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Forum:Presidential Election
Since we have a precedent, since the conventions have started, and I guess since Donut poked his head in, I thought I'd start a forum on the US Presidential election of 2012, if anyone feels the need to vent. Though I traditionally voted Republican when I was younger, and had a reputation as a rightist back in the Better Board days, I find myself staunchly in Obama's camp this time around. Shortly before the Congressional midterm election in 2010 I realized that the GOP had really gone off the rails. I think it went something like this: The unpopularity of second-term Bush combined with the extreme charisma of candidate Obama led so many independent- and loosely aligned Republican voters to jump ship that the GOP was looking like a rump party. Given the somewhat limited sense of political history that so many Americans have, people underestimated the resilience of the two-party system; and, rather than realizing that both parties have, with great historical frequency, come back from terrible landslide defeats many times, public opinion perpetuated a narrative that had the GOP in danger of extinction. The remaining party faithful bought into this, started feeling desperate, and turned to the only other slice of the electorate that had rejected Obama emphatically: certain fringe elements who will never, ever vote Democratic, and who also regularly reject Republicans for being "too liberal," ie insufficiently radical. Eight short years ago their leftist counterparts lamented that Democrats were "too conservative," which of course means the same thing; but there were enough mainstream Democrats to block any designs the radicals may have had on taking over. But now, these fringe elements, seeing how shrunken the GOP had become, saw an opportunity to hijack the party by showing up for caucuses and primaries en masse and drowning out the suddenly small mainstream GOP base--the Tea Baggers. Meanwhile, Obama's very dubious decision to put all his eggs in the basket of health care reform, rather than something that would have been an easier sell and, frankly, more urgently needed, such as jobs creation, broke the spell that had been set over so many of us. By "the spell" I refer to the main reason I didn't support Obama back then, what I dubbed Obamania: the largely unspoken but certainly widespread vague perception that he had transcended politics and was going to usher in some sort of golden age of utopian leadership (memorably lampooned on Doctor Who a year later during David Tennant's regeneration episode). This Obamania had won him far, far broader electoral support than the traditional Democratic base (which would have been true of anyone, given how tarnished the Republican brand had become) and also far deeper support. Almost all the swing voters swung his way, but in swinging there they thought they were aiding some fundamental transformative moment rather than taking part in usual political trends. But the bruising health care battle saw the President reach the limits of his ability to bystep the usual political process through force of personality. It revealed that Obama was in fact a politician like any other, well-meaning, imperfect, flawed, and able to do only so much. This led to a profound sense of disappointment which in turn led to a backlash in the Congressional election really out of proportion to the magnitude of presidential error in the first half of his term. But since the Tea Baggers had radicalized the GOP, the swing voters voting Republican found themselves supporting agenda that were not at all centrist. The old guard leadership who'd stayed faithful through the lean years of Obamania, people like Mitch McConnell and Bill Kristol, felt a sense of elation that they'd reversed Democratic momentum and completed their comeback so quickly, and convinced themselves they had a mandate to do . . . something. However, they found that they'd made a deal with the Devil to get majorities and now relied on radical elements to govern. (Condoleeza Rice's speech tonight really drove home to me just how far the party has shifted from what it was when Bush was its leader.) This pulled the leadership into a position where they were really uncomfortable, leaving them unable to exercise effective control over their backbenchers and fulfill their constitutional roles responsibly. Anything based on the principle of compromise which the White House is quite responsibly extending was dead on arrival. (And that's the best interpretation I can put on why the GOP congressional leadership is so pathetically lame.) The only "mandate" that every element of the GOP agreed they had was to halt the 2009 accomplishments of the Obamaniacs; so rather than ask for revisions to those policies, like responsible adults, they decided to deadlock the Federal government altogether in ancitipation of the 2012 election and hope that a Republican President would give them some direction. Then the campaign began late last year, and the candidates stepping forward for the Republicans were just embarrassing, so much so that I was almost insulted as a US citizen by the assumption that I couldn't see through them. Donald Trump? What is this, a joke? I didn't mind Sarah Palin so much in 2008, and certainly felt she was the victim of an undeserved hatchet job; but it wasn't long before she revealed that she was in over her head. Michelle Bachmann looked like she might be a more substantive version of Palin at first glance, but that didn't last long. Herman Cain. . . . He would have broken Hancock's record as the most inexperienced presidential candidate in history, his only claim to fame was running some pizza chain I'd never heard of, he wrote tax policy the way Yoko Ono wrote Beatles songs, and to paraphrase Anastas Mouradian, he put his foot in his mouth as soon as he opened it. It's a pretty frightening idea that none of those things managed to drive away his support base. Instead he was sunk by an extramarital affair--the oldest trap in politics, so much so that watching a serious contender fall into it looked downright quaint. Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, they were more of the same, and Ron Paul was the worst of all. I really can't imagine how any intelligent person could fall for his bankrupt, incoherent "philosophy." The only one I really liked was John Huntsman, but he never had a chance in a party hijacked by radicals. I hope he tries again at some point in the future when sanity has been restored to the GOP. And then there's Romney. He was next in line by the conventional wisdom of Republican traditions; I had hoped that his victory in the primaries would be a sign that the mainstream of the party was reasserting itself. And his track record as governor of Massachusetts seemed to suggest centrism and pragmatism were important to him. But looking at his whole career, I think he's not so much centrist and pragmatic as he is inconsistent and easily influenced. He's also hampered by his lukewarm reception among the new GOP base. Most candidates run toward the extreme in the primaries and then switch to the center in the general after they've won their base's support. But he never really won his base's support; he just managed to outlast a bunch of self-defeating challengers. So now he has to continue to curry favor with the Republican base, and as I said, the Republican base has gone mad. I had hoped he'd pull this nutball party back into the mainstream, but instead we see the nutball party pulling him out of it. His selection of a running mate showed just how much in their orbit he really is. Any possibility of my voting for Romney ended the day he announced Ryan as his choice for the other half of the ticket. Ryan is one of the few Republicans who's managed to build a bridge between the old-line party diehards and the Teabagging radicals. I'm sure he'd be a serious and effective Vice President, and can return the role to the prestige of involved technocrats that peaked with Bush the Elder, immediately evaporated with Quayle, saw a moderate return with Gore, was corrupted by the amoral Cheney, and is now being largely disregarded with the ineffective Biden. Ryan also would give the White House a channel of communication with its allies in the Capitol, something that most administrations of the last generation have lacked as the importance of legislative experience is downplayed in selecting candidates. However, Ryan is an extremist at heart, even if he's polished enough to coat his extremism with a thick veneer of conventional respectability which can be mistaken for mainstream moderation. I couldn't believe he was able to keep a straight face during his acceptance speech as he went on and on about how committed he is to saving Medicare. The fact that he was able to do so, and the larger truth to which that fact points, makes him dangerous; and since Romney is in some ways actually worse than Kerry when it comes to equivocating his positions on the issues, there's every reason to believe Ryan is going to have influence out of proportion to his office in crafting administration positions. And since his positions are deemed acceptable by the lunatics who are running the asylum in the GOP's House caucus, we get a glimpse at how radical those positions will be. And the opposition party generally dances to the tune called by even the weakest Presidents. The Democratic Congress of '07 and '08 did so for Bush; the Republican Congress in office now is trying to resist the pressure to follow suit, but is finding that the only other option is to do nothing at all. You'd have to go back to Andrew Johnson's term to find an opposition party that was able to use even huge Congressional majorities to set the agenda in the face of presidential resistance. So electing Romney and Ryan could conceivably allow radical fringe moments that in happier times were sidelined by the two-party system to seize control, for a time, over both parties. On the other hand, rejecting the Republican ticket will hopefully send the message that bad behavior will not be rewarded, that uncompromising obstructionism is completely unacceptable in a party seeking seats in a legislature that is very different from Westminstrian Parliaments, and that the electorate demands a return to responsible political behavior. I believe that voting Republican this year would be reckless to the point of immorality. But that's just me. There are, of course, many Americans who feel differently. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:33, August 30, 2012 (UTC) :(Does this forum talk stuff work the same way as the other talk pages do?) ::How so, exactly? In most ways, yes; or at least, we've been following the same format. The fora have their own talk pages. I can't imagine what we'd ever need those for. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:55, September 4, 2012 (UTC) :::I wasn't sure at first whether to go into edit mode like a page's talk page, or "Leave Message." I decided to go with what I was already used to. Jelay14 (talk) 19:59, September 4, 2012 (UTC) :I've been a regular follower of this year's election, and over the course of 2012 I realized that in 2004 and 2008 I did not twinge with horror at the prospect of Bush's second term or a McCain government the way I do this year with a Romney victory. And if anyone remembers from the BB days of 2006 I was hardly a fan of George Walker Bush and the Republican Party. Jelay14 (talk) 04:10, September 4, 2012 (UTC) Presidential Election Interesting analysis SJ. I'd wondered over the past few years how you would have evolved politically within the current paradigm. Especially since I remember that while you were a conservative you always seemed to firmly reject Libertarianism, even moreso then me. Looking back what amazes me is that on certain issues I sounded rhetorically more like a small government conservative/libertarian then you did. I always kind of suspected that you would have hated the Tea Party because of this. Overtime I think that i've philosophically become less Libertarian and more populist. :I never really was a true conservative, I don't think; I've always rejected attempts to reduce politics to a one- or even two-dimensional continuum. You end up bundling together all sorts of positions that are completely unrelated to each other (as I experienced tonight when I watched the leaders of the campaign I'm supporting make frequent references to social positions I find irrelevant, objectionable, and annoying). :In the last few years I've seen major changes to pretty much every area of my life. My politics did shift a bit along the journey, but it's more than that. I think I'm not too too far from where I stood years ago, but what's considered left, right, and center has changed. The Republican establishment has receded from my positions and I'm now in the space between the parties. The Democrats are the nearer shore. :I voted for Chris Christie in '09 with real excitement; that's one I now regret, though Corzine really did have to go. In '10 I had real trepidation about the Republican Congressional leadership taking over Congress; I didn't think it would be as bad as it has been, but I knew it wouldn't be good. Nevertheless I voted for my incumbent Republican Congressman (neither of my Senators were up that year) for this reason: Very few moderate Republican Representatives had survived the double whammy of the Democrats nearly running the tables in the swing districts in '06 and '08. I foresaw a House GOP caucus filled with fire-eaters from safe districts in rural parts of the country, and Tea-Bagging Young Turks. (I was right.) I figured it would be a very bad idea to remove the few remaining moderates from that caucus, especially since my Congressman has seniority to the freshman class of '10 and his presence may some day prevent one of them from chairing a committee or something. I'm faced with the same dilemma this year, worsened by the fact that he seems fairly good about towing Boehner's line in a lot of things (and the few things where he continues to take an independent stand are mostly positions I don't care for). Turtle Fan (talk) 04:39, September 5, 2012 (UTC) Funny enough I remember thinking myself about the phenomenon of the Republican Party being taken over by radicals shortly after the end of the 2008 election. I bought (wishful thinking I guess) into the argument that the GOP was on its last legs and was about to go the way of the Whigs and almost found myself wondering if we were headed for a TL-191 type scenario in which the Democrats were going to become a monolithic party ruiling politics for a long time and possibly even becoming the conservative party with the Greens emerging as the opposition. The Republicans would continue to exist as a small party but unlike TL-191 they would be far-right instead of centrist. I guess that the economy staying bad for a lot longer then anybody expected combined with low voter turnout really allowed the GOP to make a comeback in 2010 and kind of put the kabosh on any discussion of them "going the way of the whigs." Donut (talk) 20:48, September 4, 2012 :Wasn't going to happen, not even if the two factors you've named had not been present. The Whigs and the other extinct Antebellum parties were temporary electoral alliances formed to pursue some specific set of agenda: for the Whigs, transitioning to a capitalist economy; for the Know-Nothings, furthering nativist goals; for the Anti-Masonics, blocking the largely phantasmic political influence of the Freemasons in New York (hard to imagine how they ever went anywhere); for the National Republicans, providing a place for Jackson-haters to attempt a unified opposition; for the Federalists, getting the Constitution ratified. (After that was done they very quickly became something of a joke.) :The Democrats and Republicans are something different. They are permanent parties, and they're here to say. While each was founded around specific agenda back in the day, they've proved far more versatile than that, gradually shifting focus as one set of issues falls away to be in position to reinvent themselves by taking up a new banner of some emerging concern of the electorate. They've mainly survived this way by defining themselves in opposition to one another: When a new controversy emerges, it's more or less reduced to a yes-or-no question. If both Yes and No have large groups of proponents, each party will absorb one group into its coalition. If there's something approaching consensus, both parties will adopt that position, and the opposition will be out of luck. (The best example I can think of from somewhat recent history is the containment policy; both parties supported it, though they may have differed on the details; and in 1972, when the Democrats seemed to be backing away from it, they were punished at the polls by a landslide defeat.) :Actually, it's almost a kind of yin and yang at this point. If one party were to go defunct, I think the other would find itself transformed to the point of unrecognizability, not just in terms of platform but in terms of general culture and way of doing business. Permanently crippling the GOP would have required something far more significant than the landslide victory of a charismatic candidate, and would have to unfold over a much longer period of time than one election cycle. I didn't think the Republicans would make their comeback as quickly as they did; I saw them gradually chipping away at Democratic Congressional majorities over the course of four or five sessions, and running a presidential candidate who would lose to Obama by a much smaller margin, but still decisively, with the prospect of any serious possibility of victory on hold till '16. But I knew they'd be back. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:39, September 5, 2012 (UTC) By the way I must be having some weird freak time travel occurance because going through the history of this topic the last two revisions said "as of September 5, 2012" even though when I sat down at this computer it was September 4th. :That always happens. I assume our server is in Europe or something; everything is listed as six or seven hours ahead of New York time. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:39, September 5, 2012 (UTC) ::I think it's because the default time is UTC. You should be able to override it. Jelay14 (talk) 01:25, September 6, 2012 (UTC) :::It's never bothered me enough to do anything about. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:52, September 6, 2012 (UTC)